Steve Schnaar: King's life a model of compassion in action

As our nation pauses to celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., our thoughts rightly dwell on his role as a leader in the Civil Rights movement. After all, he dedicated years of his life fighting Jim Crow, a bitter struggle that saw him and fellow protesters attacked and jailed, his house and family fire-bombed, himself stabbed and badly wounded long before his eventual assassination.

Yet to limit our image of King strictly to this aspect of his career is to do him an injustice. Over the years King's compassion expanded to encompass all the suffering people of the world, and to challenge the underlying economic and political structures that cause this suffering. "There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance," he noted in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. "The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually." Mankind's very survival, he went on, depends on our ability to solve the problems of racial injustice, poverty, and war, the solution of which in turn depends on, "man squaring his moral progress with his scientific progress, and learning the practical art of living in harmony."

Inspired in part by meetings with the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, King later came to oppose the Vietnam War, as well as the underlying military-economic system that saw U.S. military and covert forces wreaking havoc from Gautemala to Peru to Mozambique and beyond. In our insatiable greed for profits from overseas investments, he said, the U.S. had become, "the greatest purveryor of violence in the world," and was, "on the wrong side of world revolution." By which he did not mean an armed Communist revolution, but rather a "revolution of values" taking us from a thing-oriented society to a people-oriented one.

Back home, King's efforts broadened from the struggle for civil rights to include social and economic justice as well. Calling for an end to poverty, King supported struggles like that of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, where he persisted in spite of threats against him and was ultimately assassinated. Meanwhile King's spiritual vision had grown beyond the Protestant theology of his upbringing to declare a "Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief" in love as, "the supreme unifying principle of life ... that somehow unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality."

The thread tying together King's inner and outer visions, and all his varied struggles, was compassion. For King, this was not merely a sentimental feeling of sympathy from afar, but a powerful swelling of love that spurs one into action. "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar," he proclaimed. "It is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring."

Rare among us are those who cultivate so deeply the inner truths of the spirit, balanced with an equal dedication to the struggle for peace and justice without. To see King in this light is to recognize that far from being a hero of a bygone era of the segregated South, his insight and example serve as clearly as ever as a model for those who dream of a more just and sustainable world. To truly honor King this MLK holiday let us then cultivate our own compassion, and direct that energy into our own struggles against, "the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism", which persist today in our racist system of mass incarceration, our attacks on immigrant communities, our ongoing wars and interventions, and our culture of consumer excess built on exploited labor and environmental degradation.

Steve Schnaar is a member of the Hub for Sustainable Living. He lives in Santa Cruz.